corporate management game
plan

"The consequences to the average citizen from
business crimes are staggering: The combined burglary, mugging and other
property losses induced by the country's street punks come to about $4 billion
a year. However, the seemingly upstanding citizens in our corporate board rooms
and the humble clerks in our retail stores bilk us out of between $40 and $200
billion a year." - Georgette Bennett

"My boss seemed intent on retraining me according
to a certain cognitive style - that of the corporate world, from which he had
recently come. This style demanded that I project an image of rationality but
not indulge too much in actual reasoning." - Matthew B. Crawford

"The dominant ideologies of the most destructive
and powerful transnational corporations are predatory and tyrannical in nature.
The notion that they are even remotely interested in such things as "free
trade," or democracy flies in the
face of basic common sense. The
corporations
wreaking the most havoc on this planet, the central banks, the military,
medical, pharmaceutical, agricultural, and energy industrial complexes,
have set up monopolies and cartels by using the powers of government to
legislate and regulate the industries they wish to control. The people inclined
to abuse their wealth and power do what they always have done throughout
history. They TAKE the most, give the least, and don't give a damn about the
rest of humanity. There is a mountain of evidence to prove that powerful
transnational corporations, through their control of our election process, the
legislative powers of government, the courts, the international treaty process,
the world's currencies and of course, virtually total control of our mainstream
media, have just about totally taken over our country." -
http://www.kickthemallout.com/

"Well," answered the
scorpion, who was good with words when
he wanted something, "then I wouldn't be able to get across the
river."

"Well," said the
frog, "then how do I know that you
won't sting and kill me as soon as we're across the
river?"

"Oh," said the
scorpion, "because I'll be so grateful
for the ride, why would I want to kill you then?"

This con-vinced the
frog asfrogs are easy to fool - so he let
the scorpion on his back, and began
swimming across the river. They were about 2/3 of the way across the raging
river, when, to his great surprise, the
frog felt a painful sting and looked
around to see the scorpion pulling his stinger out of the frog's back.

Think of those
android-type men in the "Matrix" movies,
for instance. Or the Orcs and Sauron in "Lord of the Rings," or the governor of
California as the "Terminator," that robot programmed only to destroy until it
was destroyed.

I suppose the most famous story like this is still Mary Shelly's 1818
tale of Dr. Frankenstein and the monster
he created from dead human body parts.

There have been a lot of movies on this theme in the past few years.
The "Terminator," "Total Recall," Darth Vader in "Star Wars," the
casual indifference to life in
"Pulp Fiction," the powerful forces of greed and destruction in "Lord of the Rings" -
you can probably think of another half dozen.

When I was growing up,
the most powerful movie like this was
the original 1956 version of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers."

A mindless life force from outer space drifted from a desolate, dead
planet and wound up on this one.

It operated under a simple program.

When a human fell asleep
near it, it produced a giant pod that duplicated the sleeping person, taking
their body, looks, even their memory, and
draining their life, then destroying the original and taking their place.

Then if the cosmic winds are right,
they may blow across the galaxy and
suck the life out of yet another planet.

I've met a half dozen
people who grew up when I did, saw that movie, and were similarly moved to think of
real versus unreal people, the way kids 150 years ago probably thought in terms
of real people versus Frankenstein monsters.

They're finally quite
superficial: all power, no depth; all manipulation, no conection I can see you
making a mental list of some of your ex-friends . Now what is this about?

Why am I talking about persons who are not real persons, psychopaths
and scorpions who have been programmed
to destroy, even if it also destroys them?

What on
Earth does this have to do with a respectable
church sermon? It's a way of introducing the business of trying to understand
the powers that have largely taken over our American society and are on the verge of taking over the world.

That sounds
so dramatic it almost needs a science
fiction movie with special effects
to make it scary enough.

But I am talking about a person that we have
created, a person that is not a real person, that has immense
power, more money than God, and which, like the
invasion of the body snatchers, is seeking to, and
succeeding in, destroying the compassionate
qualities of some societies and real people.

You'll think I've badly
overstated the case when I say that this dangerous person who is not a real
person is the corporation.

So let me try and persuade you.

Only
a very few of these insights are mine. I got the rest from a remarkable book by
a Canadian law professor named
Joel Bakan. The title of the book
is "The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power."

Corporations
formed in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, to pool the
money of a large number of people in order
to give the corporation more
power than any single business could have.

Very early, laws were
passed saying investors had no liability for whatever dastardly deeds the
corporation
committed. All investors could lose was their investment.

This gave the
corporation
limited liability, but unlimited ability to make money.

It's something you can't
imagine ever wanting to do with a person,
isn't it?

And from the start, as a matter of structure and law, the
only purpose of a corporation
was to make as much money as possible for
its stockholders.

By the late 19th century, the courts had transformed the
corporation into "a person",
a "legal person", and even spoke of it in that way.

And in 1866, lawyers
representing this newly-created "person" won a ruling from the Supreme Court
saying that, as a "legal person", corporations were
entitled to be protected by the
14th amendment for "due process of
law" and "equal protection of the law."

These provisions of the
14th amendment, as you may
remember, were written for the protection of freed
slaves after the War Between the
States.

But since 1866, it has been used almost never by freed
slaves, and almost exclusively to
protect corporations - even when they make
slaves of
workers all over the third
world and, some would argue, within our own country.

I am betting
that not many of you knew that.

Until a few years ago, I didn't know it
either. Isn't that odd, that we didn't know that?

Since being
christened as "persons", corporations have done what any person would do: they
have fought for both survival and dominance, lobbying for laws that favor their
aims, and buying influence, lawyers, judges, politicians and presidents (Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover,
Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
Harry Truman, Lyndon Baines
Johnson, Ronald Reagan, George H.W.
Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush)
when they can - and, looking back, it seems they can quite often.

It
isn't seen as evil. Its just business as usual. And
what are their aims?

You might say that it depends on the corporations,
that they are free to do whatever they want.

That's not the truth.

If the
corporation
sells stock, its sole legal
purpose, under international and American laws, is to make as much
money as possible for its
stockholders.

In a 1933 Supreme Court judgement,
Justice Louis Brandeis finally made the
obvious conection, when he stated that corporations were "Frankenstein
monsters" capable of doing great evil.

Joel Bakan cites another famous case
from 1994, in which General Motors was sued because on Christmas Day 1993 a
mother with her four children in the car was hit from behind while stopped at a
stop light, causing her gas tank of her 1979 Chevy Malibu to explode, burning
and badly disfiguring all five of them.

During the trial, a report was
introduced showing that GM knew the gas tank was set so far back that it could
explode on impact, killing the car's occupants. In fact, about five hundred
people had been killed this way at the time of the report in 1973 when the new
Malibu style cars were being planned.

A statistician figured that each
fatality could cost the company $200,000 in legal damages, then divided the
figure by 41 million, the number of cars GM had on the road. (Incorrect
assumption unless all had the gas tank situated the same!)

The
statistician concluded that each death cost GM only $2.40 per automobile. The
cost of ensuring that fuel tanks did not explode in crashes was estimated to be
$8.59 per car. That meant the company could save $6.19 per car if it let people
die in fuel-fed fires rather than alter the
design of vehicles to avoid such fires.

The huge jury award was
later reduced by 3/4, and General Motors appealed the case.

It involves a Marine Corps Major General named
Smedley Darlington Butler, one of World War I's most highly decorated
soldiers.

On August 21, 1931, Major General Smedley
Darlington Butler stunned an audience at an American Legion convention in
Connecticut when he had said:

"I spent
thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of
this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all
commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major General. And during that
period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business,
for Wall Street and for the
Bankers. In short, I was
a racketeer, a gangster for
corporatism.

I was rewarded with
honors, medals, promotions.
During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell
racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few
hints. The best he could do was to operate a racket in three districts.
The Marines operated on three
continents."

Given that speech, and Smedley Darlington Butler's
disgust with the role the military played, not in serving
democracy but in serving the
greed of
large corporations, what
happened three years later is truly stunning.

In 1934,
Fortune magazine had a cover story extolling the
virtues of fascism and the economic miracles
Mussolini had achieved in lowering wages, crushing worker unions, and creating
greater profits for the corporations.

In 1934, the business interests believed
they would have to use military force to take over the government, dismantle
democracy, and install a form of fascist government doing the will of the
richest corporations and individuals in America, to the degradation or
destruction of everyone else.

This was the
invasion of the body snatchers, coming closer than we can know to
succeeding.

"Today, seventy years after the failed coup, a
well-organized minority again threatens
democracy. Corporate
America's long and patient campaign to gain
control of government over the last few decades, much quieter and ultimately
more effective than the plotters' clumsy attempts, is now succeeding. Without
bloodshed, armies, or fascist strongmen, and using dollars rather than bullets,
corporations are now poised to win what the plotters so desperately wanted:
freedom from
democratic control." -
Joel Bakan

Their reach is
now worldwide. The World Trade Organization has already sued nations,
including ours, for safety or environmental laws that cut into corporate
profits.

When the full power of the World Trade Organization
comes into effect corporations will be able to prevent governments from
enacting environmental or health
regulations that would unduly impede corporate profits.

There are many more details, and the picture is
considerably worse, than I've had time to sketch for you.

I don't think
there are many books that all Americans should read, but I think this is one of
them.

Is there hope? Can anything be done?

Yes, but only if we remember that we created
this Frankenstein monster, and it is only a "person" because we said so, and we
can change our opinions and change our laws and change the way in which
corporations are allowed to do business in this country and in the world.

You can find lists of cities and counties that have revoked the
charters of corporations, and refused to let them operate unless they are
reconstituted to serve the good of society, the common good, rather than just
the greed of a few men and women.

New York Attorney General Eliot
Spitzer recently said that if "a corporation is convicted of repeated felonies
that harm or endanger the lives of human beings or destroy our environment, the
corporation should be put to death, its corporate existence ended, and its
assets taken and sold at public auction."

Eliot Spitzer isn't
anti-government. He works for the government. The government isn't bad, it's a
neutral but powerful tool that can be used to reclaim our nation and redefine
the acceptable role of corporations in our world.

We created
corporations, we defined them, and we have the authority to redefine them, to
insist that they may only operate in our society if they are organized to serve
the greater good of the majority in our society, rather than simply the
arrogant greed of a tiny percentage of us.

Corporations need to be
taxed again, and taxed to pay a fair share of our economy's expenses, just as
the tax rates on rich individuals needs to be raised (after all they do use
government provided facilities for business purposes -ie. roads for
transportation, ocean and river ports, airports, ad infinitum. In 1960, the tax
rate was 91% for the richest Americans, and corporations paid fair taxes.

That is why our middle class was empowered after World War II, because
the money was being distributed fairly.

Today, we have socialism for
the rich, and a brutal kind of corporatism for everyone else.

Halliburton, Dick Cheney's former
corporation, has made billions of dollars from contracts they haven't even
had to bid on. Other large American corporations that contributed to the
presidential campaign have also made hundreds of millions of dollars.

Some of their civilian truck drivers are being paid $80,000 a year to
risk getting killed making profits for the
stockholders.

Meanwhile,
many of our American soldiers, as you may have read, are getting paid $16,000 a
year, a pay so low that they are being given
food stamps with their pay, and
many of their families back home are on welfare. The soldiers are not fighting
and dying for democracy, freedom, or anything noble at all.

They are
dying, like Smedley Darlington
Butler's soldiers died eighty years ago, as inconsequential drones whose
only purpose in life is to help Halliburton, other major American
corporations and rich individuals make a lot of money.

This is the story of the Frankenstein monster come full circle, to the
point where it is succeeding in forcing its human creators to serve it, even if
they become beggars or corpses by doing so.

It is un-American.

It is ungodly.

It is inhuman and it is disgusting.

And
it is continuing.

Only the American people are likely to stop it, and
then only if they wake up, get informed, get angry, get organized and get
going.

I can't write an ending for this sermon.

It would have
to be written in the real world, in real time, by real people.

But
there is something riding on our backs that doesn't belong there, and that does
not have looking after our best interests.

It will, if it is allowed to
remain there, eat our soul and our society.

Nor can it really stop
itself.

It has been programmed with a very simple program: justified by
man's law.

Sermon by Davidson Loehr, November 7,
2004

[We should be
aware that under every
stone a
scorpion may be lodged! The crow
seizing on a scorpion thought he had
got a delicate morsel only to be stung to death. The adage is applicable to
persons, who, meditating mischief to others, find the evil recoil upon themselves with redoubled
force.]

Karl
Marx thought corporatism would have a problem finding consumers for the
goods that improving techniques of production enabled it to churn out.

Instead, corporatism has become expert in a new branch of
manufacturing: the manufacture of
desires.

It's that core logic of ever-expanding desires that is
unsustainable on a global scale." - Timothy Garton Ash

"Much of
modern industrial culture has been built upon the premise of perpetual material
growth. The human world is beyond its limits. The present way of doing things
is unsustainable. The future, to be viable at all, must be one of drawing back,
easing down, healing. Sustainability, not better weapons or
struggles for power or material accumulation,
is the ultimate challenge to the energy and creativity of the human race.

The deepest difference between optimists and pessimists is their
position in the debate about whether human beings are able to
operate collectively from a basis of
compassion. In a society that systematically develops in people their
individualism, their competitiveness, and their cynicism, the pessimists are
the vast majority. That pessimism is the single greatest problem of the current
social system and the deepest cause of unsustainability.

A culture that
cannot believe in, discuss, and develop the best human qualities is one that
suffers from a tragic distortion of
information. " - Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, and Jørgen
Randers

As long as legal constructs, in
the institutionalized form of corporations, have more say in governing American
social culture than living American people, then it is guaranteed that American
social culture will continue to degrade.

The Corporatistfinancial system is
soulless and not having a soul it can not decide what is good for humanity
and what is bad for humanity - all it can do is serve the purpose it was
designed to serve - increase shareholder value.

Throughout history we
have been warned of the time when money, though lacking a soul, develops a
will.

That time is once more upon us as the financial wizards, agents
of syndicate of the soulless, have risen their god - Mammon - which now
enslaves us in debt bondage.

Life, based on debt bondage, sacrifices
one's own flesh and blood through work to pay off debt -personal and cultural.

This is not freedom.

There is no liberty in debt bondage.

Life is granted by God.

Life, includes humanity - the children
of God.

God does not want his children bound, especially not in debt
bondage to the false god Mammon.

"No man can serve two masters; for
either he will hate the one, and compassion the other; or else he will hold to
one, and despise the other. A man cannot serve God and mammon." - attributed to
Jesus, Matthew 6:24

Humanity still can chose the path it wants to
follow - now Mammon reigns supreme!

Will no one answer the call to put
social justice - Jesus dharma - on the throne?

This web site is not a
commercial web site and is presented for educational purposes
only.

This website defines a new
perspective with which to engage reality to which its author adheres. The
author feels that the falsification of reality outside personal experience has
created a populace unable to discern
propaganda from reality
and that this has been done purposefully by an international corporate cartel
through their agents who wish to foist a corrupt version of reality on the
human race. Religious intolerance occurs when any group refuses to tolerate
religious practices, religious beliefs or persons due to their religious
ideology. This web site marks the founding of a system of philosophy named The
Truth of the Way of Life - a rational gnostic mystery religion based on reason
which requires no leap of faith, accepts no tithes, has no supreme leader, no
church buildings and in which each and every individual is encouraged to
develop a personal relation with the Creator and Sustainer through the pursuit
of the knowledge of reality in the hope of curing the spiritual corruption that
has enveloped the human spirit. The tenets of The Truth of the Way of Life are
spelled out in detail on this web site by the author. Violent acts against
individuals due to their religious beliefs in America is considered a
hate crime."

This web site in no way condones violence. To the
contrary the intent here is to reduce the violence that is already occurring
due to the international corporate cartels desire to control the human race.
The international corporate cartel already controls the world central banking
system, mass media worldwide, the global industrial military entertainment
complex and is responsible for the collapse of morals, the elevation of
self-centered behavior and the destruction of global ecosystems. Civilization
is based on cooperation. Cooperation does not occur at the point of a
gun.

American social mores and values have declined precipitously over
the last century as the corrupt international cartel has garnered more and more
power. This power rests in the ability to deceive the populace in general
through mass media by pressing emotional buttons which have been preprogrammed
into the population through prior mass media psychological operations. The
results have been the destruction of the family and the destruction of social
structures that do not adhere to the corrupt international elites vision of a
perfect world. Through distraction and coercion the
direction of thought of the bulk of the population has been directed toward
solutions proposed by the corrupt international elite that further consolidates
their power and which further their purposes.

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presented on this web site are the views and opinions of individual human men
and women that, through their writings, showed the capacity for intelligent,
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